"Attitude"

Ms Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental
activist. She is among the most-honored authors of fiction in recent history.

Margaret Atwood
The University Of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

JUNE 14TH, 1983

I am of course overjoyed to be here today in the role of

ceremonial object. There is more than the usual amount
of satisfaction in receiving an honorary degree from the
university that helped to form ones erstwhile callow and
ignorant mind into the thing of dubious splendor that it is
today; whose professors put up with so many overdue
term papers, and struggled to read ones handwriting, of
which interesting is the best that has been said; at which
one failed to learn Anglo-Saxon and somehow missed
Bibliography entirely, a severe error which I trust no one
present here today has committed; and at which one
underwent excruciating agonies not only of soul but of
body, later traced to having drunk too much coffee in the
bowels of Wymilwood.

It is to Victoria College that I can attribute the fact that Bell Canada, Oxford University
Press and McClelland and Stewart all failed to hire me in the summer of 63, on the
grounds that I was a) overqualified and b) couldnt type, thus producing in me that
state of joblessness, angst and cosmic depression which everyone knows is
indispensable for novelists and poets, although nobody has ever claimed the same for
geologists, dentists or chartered accountants. It is also due to Victoria College,
incarnated in the person of Northrop Frye, that I didnt run away to England to become
a waitress, live in a garret, write masterpieces and get tuberculosis. He thought I might
have more spare time for creation if I ran away to Boston, lived in a stupor, wrote
footnotes and got anxiety attacks, that is, if I went to Graduate School, and he was
right. So, for all the benefits conferred upon me by my Alma Mater, where they taught
me that the truth would make me free but failed to warn me of the kind of trouble Id
get into by trying to tell it - I remain duly grateful.

But everything has its price. No sooner had I tossed off a graceful reply to the letter
inviting me to be present today than I began to realize the exorbitance of what was
expected of me. I was going to have to come up with something to say, You may

not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it,
and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see. to a graduating class
in 1983, year of the Ph.D. taxi driver, when young people have unemployment the way
they used to have ugly blackheads; something presumably useful, wise, filled with
resonance and overview, helpful, encouraging and optimistic. After all, you are being
launched - though ever since I experienced the process, Ive wondered why
convocation is the name for it. Ejection would be better. Even in the best of times,
its more or less like being pushed over a cliff, and these are not the best of times. In
case you havent figured it out already, Im here to tell you that its an armpit out
there. As for your university degree, there are definitely going to be days when you will
feel that youve been given a refrigerator and sent to the middle of a jungle, where
there are no three-pronged grounded plugholes.
Not only that, the year will come when you will wake up in the middle of the night and
realize that the people you went to school with are in positions of power, and may soon
actually be running things. If theres anything more calculated to thick mens blood with
cold, its that. After all, you know how much they didnt know then, and, given yourself
as an example, you cant assume they know a great deal more now. Were all
doomed, you will think. (For example: Brian Mulroney is only a year older than I am.)
You may feel that the only thing to do when youve reached this stage is to take up
nail-biting, mantras, or jogging, all of which would be recognized by animal behavior
specialists as substitution activities, like scratching, which are resorted to in moments
of unresolved conflict. But well get around to some positive thinking in a moment.

What shall I tell them! I thought, breaking out into a cold sweat, as I tossed and
turned night after night. (Lest you leap to indulge in Calvinistic guilt at the idea of
having been the proximate cause of my discomfort, let me hasten to add that I was on
a boat. The tossing and turning was par for the course, and the cold sweat can be cured
by Gravol). For a while I toyed with the idea of paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut, who told
one graduating class, Everything is going to become unbelievably worse and will never
get better again, and walked off the stage. But thats the American style: boom or
bust. A Canadian would be more apt to say, things may be pretty mediocre but lets at
least try to hold the line.
Then I thought that maybe I could say a few words on the subject of a liberal arts
education, and how it prepares you for life. But sober reflection led me to the
conclusion that this topic too was a washout; for, as you will soon discover, a liberal
arts education doesnt exactly prepare you for life. A preparation-for-life curriculum
would not consist of courses on Victorian Thought and French Romanticism, but of
things like How to Cope With Marital Breakdown, Getting More for your Footwear Dollar,
Dealing With Stress, and How To Keep Your Fingernails from Breaking Off by Always
Filing Them Towards the Center; in other words, it would read like the contents page
of Homemakers Magazine, which is why Homemakers Magazine is so widely read, even
by me. Or, for boys, Forbes or The Economist , and Improving Your Place in the Power
Hierarchy by Choosing the Right Suit. (Dark blue with a faint white pinstripe, not too far
apart, in case youre interested.)
Or maybe, I thought, I should expose glaring errors in the educational system, or
compile a list of things I was taught which are palpably not true. For instance, in high
school I made the mistake of taking Home Economics instead of Typing - we thought, in
those days, that if you took the commercial course most of your eyebrows would come
off and would have to be drawn on with a pencil for the rest of your life - where I was
told that every meal should consist of a brown thing, a white thing, a yellow thing and a
green thing; that it was not right to lick the spoon while cooking; and that the inside of
a dress seam was as important as the outside. All three of these ideas are false and
should be discarded immediately by anyone who still holds them.

Nor did anyone have the foresight to inform me that the best thing I could do for
myself as a writer would be back and wrist exercises. No one has yet done a study of
this, but they will, and when they start excavating and measuring the spines and arm
bones of the skeletons of famous writers of the past I am sure they will find that those
who wrote the longest novels, such as Dickens and Melville, also had the thickest
wrists. The real reason that Emily Dickinson stuck to lyric poems with relatively few
stanzas is that she had spindly fingers. You may scoff, but future research will prove
me right.

But I then thought, I shouldnt talk about writing. Few of this graduating class will wish
to be writers, and those that do should by no means be encouraged. Weave a circle
round them thrice, and close your eyes holy dread, because who needs the
competition? What with the proliferation of Creative Writing courses, a mushroom of
recent growth all but unknown in my youth, we will soon have a state of affairs in which
everybody writes and nobody reads, the exact reverse of the way things were when I
was composing dolorous verses in a rented cupboard on Charles Street in the
early sixties.

Or maybe, I thought, I should relate to them a little known fact of shocking import,
which they will remember vividly when they have all but forgotten the rest of this
speech. For example: nobody ever tells you, but did you know that when you have a
baby your hair falls out? Not all of it, and not all at once, but it does fall out. It has
something to do with a zinc imbalance. The good news is that it does grow back in. This
only applies to girls. With boys, it falls out whether you have a baby or not, and it never
grows back in; but even then there is hope. In a pinch, you can resort to quotation, a
commodity which a liberal arts education teaches you to treat with respect, and I offer
the following: God only made a few perfect heads, and the rest lie covered with hair.

Which illustrates the following point: when faced with the inevitable, you always have a
choice. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it.
As I learned during my liberal arts education, any symbol can have, in the imaginative
context, two versions, a positive and a negative. Blood can either be the gift of life or
what comes out of you when you cut your wrists in the bathtub. Or, somewhat less
drastically, if you spill your milk youre left with a glass which is either half empty or
half full.

Which brings us to the hidden agenda of this speech. What you are being ejected into
today is a world that is both half empty and half full. On the one hand, the biosphere is
rotting away. The raindrops that keep falling on your head are also killing the fish, the
trees, the animals, and, if they keep being as acid as they are now, theyll eventually do
away with things a lot closer to home, such as crops, front lawns and your digestive
tract. Nature is no longer what surrounds us, we surround it, and the switch has not
been for the better. On the other hand, unlike the ancient Egyptians, we as a
civilization know what mistakes we are making and we also have the technology to stop
making them; all that is lacking is the will.

Another example: on the one hand, we ourselves live daily with the threat of
annihilation. Were just a computer button and a few minutes away from it, and the gap
between us and it is narrowing every day. We secretly think in terms not of If the
Bomb Drops but of When the Bomb Drops, and its understandable if we sometimes
let ourselves slide into a mental state of powerlessness and consequent apathy. On the
other hand, the catastrophe that threatens us as a species, and most other species as
well, is not unpredictable and uncontrollable, like the eruption of the volcano that
destroyed Pompeii. If it occurs, we can die with the dubious satisfaction of knowing that
the death of the world was a man-made and therefore preventable event, and that the
failure to prevent it was a failure of human will.

This is the kind of world we find ourselves in, and its not pleasant. Faced with facts this
depressing, the question of the economy - or how many of us in this country can afford
two cars doesnt really loom too large, but youd never know it from reading the papers.
Things are in fact a lot worse elsewhere, where expectations center not on cars and
houses and jobs but on the next elusive meal. Thats part of the down side. The up
side, here and now, is that this is still more or less a democracy; you dont get shot or
tortured yet for expressing an opinion, and politicians, motivated as they may be by
greed and the lust for power, are nevertheless or because of this, still swayed by public
opinion. The issues raised in any election are issues perceived by those who want
power to be of importance to those in a position to confer it upon them. In other words,
if enough people show by the issues they raise and by the way theyre willing to vote
that they want changes made, then change becomes possible. You may not be able to
alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically,
alters reality.

Try it and see.